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In the best comedy there is truth, and while this week's X-vs-Advertisers lawsuit might seem like some weird joke, it comes just when we need a good laugh.
I feel good about the whole Elon Musk suing advertisers thing.
Say ma-what?!
Honestly, I do.
This is a bright chap who has carved out a decent reputation for spotting gold in the hills, with a 30-year history of online, on-the-road, and out-of-this-world business ventures which have repeatedly turned the impossible into the possible. Some were even under the road.
He’s not the world’s richest man* for nothing. (*The value of investments may go down as well as up.)
He’s clever. He spots ways to turn innovation and reputation into something else. With barely a 1% to 2% share of global car sales, he’s made Tesla the world’s most valuable car company by a country mile. The numbers don’t make sense to us mere mortals, but we’re not the ones with the money and now we know why.
He’s almost single-handedly turned the idea of private space ventures into reality, and set America on an electrified road more effectively than any President or Governor.
He’s not a man to be dissuaded by what looks impossible to the rest of us.
Well, until now.
It seems even he has finally given up on his own great White Whale - the outlandish idea that he can make money from ads on the internet in 2024.
The immovable subject
As the pre-eminent mover and shaker of our era, its poster boy innovator and entrepreneur, it is inconceivable that Elon has not sized up the online ads market for its own Musky Moment.
Of course he looked at how he could disrupt a market on course to reach $900bn by 2027, of which only two companies grab nearly 70% - Alphabet and Meta.
Alphabet alone scooped up more than 40% of global revenue share in 2023 - 18 whole years of Tesla profits! - and Meta just under 25%.
Up and coming brands like Amazon, Alibaba, Temu, TikTok, and Microsoft round out the top 10 in fighting for the remaining hundreds of billions in scraps.
Even plucky earplugs company Apple, whose fledgling search ad business barely scrapes by with $4bn a year, doesn’t even make the ad business Top 10. (Well, as long as you don't count the annual $20bn+ Google pays Apple to be the iPhone search engine.)
Sadly, nor does publishing brand X, with something like $2.5bn of ads income in 2023, less than 0.5% of what's available. You know, X, the sort-of-publishing platform where people publish stuff and it places ads next to them, like a publisher might.
Surely it is this skew in ad market share that motivated him to jump in with all that money from other people to buy X. Musk is an owner and lead investor of the consortium which bought 2024's $17bn X for $44bn a couple of years ago.
That sounds like a lot of money gone. It is! But with Space Twitter now being valued at well over $200bn, and Musk owning more than 40% of the reusable rocket company, well… all earthy X has to do to stay afloat is hold his interest.
Is that not a landscape that a disruptor dreams of? A foot in the door, a brand people know, a massive audience, and a juicy monopoly to disrupt? A publisher’s dream, almost.
It would seem not.
It would seem that even for him the current ad market stranglehold is impossible to break. So impossible that the next best route is to sue people for spending their money elsewhere.
It's official folks: the online ad market is so borked that not even Elon Musk thinks he can make it work. Welcome to what it's like being a publisher Elon.
And I am happy about that.
I am happy because, luckily for Musk, and the rest of us, the judges, counsels, and lawmakers are coming to the rescue. And his outrageous lawsuit will only shine a spotlight on the madness of the online ads market once more, just when it needs exposing the most.
With perfect timing, remember that this week's Google monopoly decision isn't even the biggest legal problem for the search ads company.
Come on Elon, chin up. It ain't easy being a publisher, but a reformation is surely coming.
(I am aware of course that Musk's suit, hardly the first filed against those he dislikes, may well have little to do with trying to change the fortunes of X... but let me dream.)
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